Microsoft’s “Solution” to SCSM Console Performance – Buy a GPU!

If you’ve ever used System Center Service Manager, you know there are many challenges with the product. One of those being the performance and responsiveness of the Console.

A few days ago, November 24th specifically, Microsoft wrote a post entitled “Improving SM console responsiveness with GPU”. They have since taken it down, presumably due to the overwhelming negative response to the article itself! Thankfully, we have the Internet, and once something is online, it stays there.

In summary, the article relates that you can “increase” the responsiveness of the SCSM Console a whole 2.5 seconds, IF you have a GPU that can render through ‘Tier 2’ of the DirectX pipeline. To quote the article: “To speed up console UI rendering we needed to use Tier 2 rendering. For this we installed the console on a machine that had a GPU (NVIDIA Quadro 600 in our case) and immediately noticed an improvement in the console responsiveness.”

In case the cached copy of the article disappears, here’s a screenshot of it.

SCSM Article Screenshot

Some of the comments in response are interesting as well.

Understandably, “some” systems may have a GPU at the level mentioned, but not all. And especially if you factor in having/using the SCSM console on the SCSM server(s) themselves, it is very unreasonable to expect, let alone recommend, the installation of a GPU into a server!

It is really sad that this is a “recommendation”. Service Manager is great as a CMDB, especially since it can correlate data from SCCM and SCOM that when you are troubleshooting a system issue, you can effectively see all the patches applied, reboots, and other various technology alerts. It’s just too bad that it wasn’t built from the ground up, instead of just a new interface on top of SCOM code!

Hey Cameron,
I think the issue is more with the fact that it’s the recommendation. If a system (i.e. desktop or higher-end laptop) already has a decent GPU, then it’s good. But to have to specifically purchase one just for a 2 second increase in performance, is a little much.